Amy has very kindly provided Whedonesque with five deleted scenes from her soon to be released biography of Joss Whedon.
1. Joss doesn’t drink coffee, he drinks Typhoo tea and is very particular about how it is served: with half and half, and three little, little teaspoons of sugar.
2. Joss was frustrated that people were not responding to Oz at first (“Possibly because he was usurping Xander’s rightful place as Willow’s paramour,” he says.”). He decided to add the scene in which Willow tries to make out with Oz in order to make Xander jealous in “Innocence.” (Oz declines, fully aware of the situation, and describes how he daydreams about her in class: “I’ll think about kissing you and then everything stops. It’s like, freeze frame. Willow kissage.” He wants to wait because “in my fantasy, when I’m kissing you… you’re kissing me.”) “I actually wrote that to make people fall in love with him. Literally [thought that] this scene will take care of the problem,” he explains. “That was the entirely cynical design of that scene.”
3. In the fifth season, the Buffy writers finally found the right story to take advantage of the fact that Nicholas Brendon, who played Xander, had a twin brother. Many ideas were pitched but “we would never just do evil twin, you know?,” Joss says. “I was thinking of Russian absurdist short stories, like Gogol’s ‘The Double’ and ‘The Nose.’ But what I was really trying to evoke was the time in your life when people start treating you like a grown-up and you didn’t realize that you were one. That’s what that was about.”
4. During construction on Joss and Kai’s home, the house was robbed and their computers and Joss’ guitars were taken. The biggest crime story in their Brentwood neighborhood, however, was when Nicole Brown Simpson, football star O.J.’s ex-wife, was killed in June 1994. The area was inundated with press covering the story, and after, Joss was often asked directions to the home by tourists. The media ascended once again in 1998 as the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. The father of the White House intern who had an affair with President Bill Clinton lived a few blocks down and reporters were camped out to get a quote from him about the national drama.
5. Jay Hunter, Much Ado About Nothing cinematographer, says that it’s possible to out-nerd Joss. “We were shooting a night exterior scene on Much Ado, and I was just chatting with AD and the gaffer and someone brought up Lord of the Rings. I started talking about these scenes that weren’t put in the movie and kind of going into this obscene amount of detail of my knowledge of The Lord of the Rings. Meanwhile, he walked out in the middle of it and stumbled on to the nerdiest conversation of all time. He said, ‘Oh, I can’t do this,’ then had to turn around and walk away.”
Joss Whedon: The Biography is out in the UK on the 24th (Amazon UK link) and will be out in the US on August 1st (Amazon.com link).
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5 “Deleted Scenes” from “Joss Whedon: The Biography” by Amy Pascale
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